As opposed to your rubbish. Why on earth would somebody buy...

As opposed to your rubbish. Why on earth would somebody buy under auction conditions if they don't have to?

All the auctions results show is the market is slowing nothing more nothing less and more and more property will be sold under non-auction conditions where it will take longer to sell until the market heats up again.
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UniversalTrader, I am not sure the point you are trying to argue? I have called out Pasqual on his statistics claim, which appears to have been made up on the spot (?). I didnt see his moderated post, but given it was TOUd for flaming I find it hard to believe the post referenced where the 70-80% actual clearance rate he used came from.

FYI I agree completely with what you are saying, private treaty is by far the best way for a buyer to negotiate with a seller.

As far as auction statistics go I agree that currently all the clearance rate is likely showing is that growth is slowing/has stopped.

The RBA recently released a report on the correlation between auction clearance rates, lending growth and capital growth:
RBA Link

I suggest having a read through it yourself. Take particular note of Graph 8 on page 5, which visually shows the correlation between the statistics. It shows that in instances where the clearance rate falls below 50% it leads to negative growth in housing prices. I would suggest the auction data they have used in the graph is from APM, this past weekend APMs auction clearance rate for Melbourne was 60%...loan approvals are already at the level indicated would cause prices to fall. I suspect auction clearance rates are on their way to a number below 50% and that we will see house prices falling very shortly (I believe we are already seeing it in many areas, however only have purely anecdotal indicators of this).

The property bulls on here seem to put all the bears into the same group, expecting housing Armageddon! I do not expect this at all, but do expect we will see a period like the early 1990s where prices drop and property loses its shine. I think we will see drops across the citywide/nation wide medians of around 20%. We could see a Keen style drop (40%), but think this is less likely and IMO we would see further government intervention before such a drop be allowed to occur.

Im not expecting the crash to happen over 1 quarter either, more likely it will drag on over several years with a few percent coming off prices each year